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Kalooga: A Case of Content Delivery Flexibility

That new player is CDN.net, which came about to "give a pay as you go model, which allows you to fully optimize your spend and make sure that you get bang for your buck, basically," explains James Fletcher, CDN.net's sales and marketing director.

"What we saw is that large CDNs out there that are available to content websites were very restrictive; they were package-based pricing, which meant you were paying a fixed fee per month, and you might not necessarily use all of that allowance every month," continues Fletcher. "So, you are always paying for say a terabyte every month and you might be using 500 gigs. Therefore, you lose out. The other thing is that those networks are very restricted in the number of locations [ they can deliver to]."

CDN.net was launched in March with what its website calls "30 premium locations" around the world and uses "a federated content delivery network," meaning its coverage is growing every day, explains its website. CDN.net's locations provide "global coverage and the best performance," adds its site.

Current CDN.net locations include Amsterdam, Atlanta, New York, Singapore, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi, London, Sao Paulo, and Moscow. CDN.net enables web publishers to select specific locations where they'd like to "ensure great performance." Selecting the right locations "will be critical in the success of your CDN implementation," says CDN.net, which can improve web acceleration and application performance.

According to Fletcher, his company has "over 2,000 plus locations available to bring online." He continues, "Currently, I think we have got about 45 available through the portal itself."

CDN.net is "just adding them in as we go," continues Fletcher of additional locations. "We are making sure that they meet quality criteria and that's infrastructure as well as up time so we are constantly evaluating the network, trying to bring on better locations, better prices."

The Outcome

Kalooga began using CDN.net's services in April and has had positive results to date, according to Noordzij. In fact, shortly after Kalooga began using CDN.net, its widget impressions for its more than 100 customers jumped substantially from about 14 million to 20 million daily.

"We did a trial, we tried it, and we were happy with the results so we are going to stick with it," he explains. "We use it as a default CDN solution for our needs and we have seen a lot of growth since we started using CDN.net. For us it was the transparency and flexibility that really got us going; their very good reach, basically all over the world. And the pricing is really, well, sharp and really flexible, so it's really easy to get going and do a trial. It works."

Kalooga uses CDN.net as a cache layer for images and scripts, according to Noordzij. "We have our own cache origin in the Netherlands and we produce our content/widgets included on publishing sites all over the world," says Noordzij.

In terms of utilizing CDN.net, "If we connect new publishers or the publishers [have] very popular content or certain spikes then we can use the CDN ... and also to speed it up if it is far from Europe," explains Noordzij. "We have customers in Latin America, so this speeds up the delivery of our images and scripts." Moving forward, Noordzij says that Kalooga plans on keeping CDN.net "in the mix for a long time."

For any publishers who may be interested in CDN.net, Fletcher was quick to point out that "the pricing is very competitive; if anything, it's cheap." He continues, "But you get the real quality of service at the same time and the flexibility of the locations and that is really our key message to the market-we want commodity pricing and flexibility for our customers not to be tied into big, long-term contracts. Obviously, we want everybody to be profitable and make money."